Friday, May 1, 2015

Possibly the worst sentence I have ever read

But "What About This" is an authentic outpouring like a warm river in
full flood; you get swept off the bank and its languid physicality
destroys you.

We all struggle to maintain a certain level of economy in our use of language, but there's a difference between having a bit of diarrhea of the mouth and just flat-out needlessly jamming adjectives in there sideways to lard up a fucking sentence.

First, if you've never been in a river that's in full flood, let me assure that they are not fucking warm. Why does a flooding river need to be warm? Fucked if I know. This dude just wanted to make his labored metaphor about poetry sound more poetical.

Second . . . yeah, reviewers are typically terrible fucking writers. They're often writers who write about writers because they wish they could be writers, so they find jobs writing about writers in order to be writers.

Third: "languid physicality"? Huh? Unless you're describing what happens to an NFL nose tackle's gut while he's being blocked by two other guys, I struggle to see how anything that's at once capable of physicality can also be languid. #EnglishFail

Added bonus . . . this fucking sentence . . .

Editor Michael Wiegers carefully selected this work from 10 collections,
including parts of "The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,"
Stanford's best-known work — a swollen, ambitious 542-page epic poem in
which even Jesus and Sonny Liston speak — as well as reams of
unpublished work.

If you ever write a 542-page epic poem, you're an asshole. If you ever encourage people to fucking read a 542-page epic poem, you're a retard. Seriously, who the fuck writes a 542-page epic poem "in
which even Jesus and Sonny Liston speak"?

Is that a fucking joke? I swear to gawd this guy was just stapling words the fuck together without any forethought. I assume that the only reason anyone would ever write a 542-page poem of any type is to troll the shit out of wannabe intellectuals.

SMFH. Just because you can use the English language to form sentences doesn't mean you should.